Diversity Statements are Discriminatory and a Waste of Time

You’re looking for a job. You hear there’s an opening at the local Caregivers Incorporated, a company that serves disabled people. This would be a perfect job for you: the hours are flexible, the pay is decent, and you have some experience as a caregiver. So you go to the website of Caregivers Incorporated and fill out an application, uploading a cover letter, resume, and list of personal references. As you’re about to submit your application, you notice you forgot to upload one document: Caregivers Incorporated requires that you upload a 1-2 page statement talking about how important diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are to you, how you’ve promoted DEI in the past, and how you’ll promote DEI in the future as an employee of Caregivers Incorporated. Call this a Diversity Statement. Having to submit a Diversity Statement strikes you as strange—you’ve not really given any thought to the promotion of DEI, nor have you looked at any empirical research surrounding DEI, so you’re in the dark about how important it actually is. Nevertheless, you want a job, so you write a couple pages of BS about how important DEI is to you and how you’ll go about promoting it in the future, and submit your application.

The above scenario is strange: whether you’d be a good employee at Caregivers Incorporated doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how committed to DEI you are. Rather, what matters is just how good you are at providing care to disabled people and how well you work with others. Of course, Caregivers Incorporated is a private business and they’re free to require whatever statements they see fit, but it’s nevertheless bizarre—in terms of relevance to the job, they might as well ask you to submit a statement talking about how awesome peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are.

Interestingly, at many public universities, one is required to submit a Diversity Statement when applying for a faculty position. In my experience, no one blinks an eye at this—few (publicly) speak out against this requirement. Outside of academia, things are different: I’ve told many normal people (i.e. people outside the academy) about Diversity Statements being required to apply for a job. Whether they’re liberal, conservative, or centrist, the reaction is the same: that’s crazy! So, what’s obvious to normal people isn’t obvious to academics—this isn’t anything new. However, it looks to me like the normal people are right on this matter: there are strong reasons not to require Diversity Statements at public universities. In short, at public universities, we shouldn’t require Diversity Statements because they’re a tool for political discrimination, they waste a large collective amount of time, and they incentivise lying and deception. In long, let’s take these points in order.

The first reason Diversity Statements shouldn’t be required is that they are a tool of political discrimination. Indeed, according to one study, 50% of professors believe Diversity Statements are a political litmus test, and according to another study, nearly 23% of tenured (or tenure track) professors think Diversity Statements are a political litmus test and that it’s appropriate to require them. Really think about that for a minute. Nearly 1 out of every 4 professors think it’s okay to use Diversity Statements as a tool of political discrimination. That’s crazy. This is a strong reason not to require Diversity Statements, since we shouldn’t politically discriminate in our hiring practices. This should be acknowledged by all parties, including those supportive of general DEI efforts. To illustrate this, I’ll let you in on a secret: all of my political beliefs are true. Nevertheless, public universities shouldn’t require applicants to write 1-2 pages talking about how important Perry’s Political Views are and how applicants will seek to promote Perry’s Values in the future. In the same vein, even those gung-ho about DEI shouldn’t be in favor of Diversity Statements used in hiring.

Perhaps you think DEI is so important to public universities that the political discrimination they enable is justified. But suppose universities in Florida started requiring applicants to submit a Free Speech Statement, where one must write 1-2 pages about how important free speech is, ways in which one has helped promote free speech in the past, and ways in which one will help promote it in the future. Everyone would be outraged: everyone would complain that Free Speech Statements would be used as a political litmus test (or perhaps that they would incite violence). But free speech is at least as important to public universities as DEI. So, since Free Speech Statements shouldn’t be required despite the importance of free speech, Diversity Statements shouldn’t be required even if DEI is important.

Perhaps you think that—despite the massive and powerful DEI bureaucracy that has emerged in recent years—there’s a significant threat to DEI at universities, and Diversity Statements are needed to help address this threat. However, one could make the same point in favor of free speech: it’s under serious threat at universities. Indeed, currently faculty are far more likely to self-censor out of fear of punishment and there are far more instances of professors being punished for their speech than in the McCarthy Era. So, if the threat to DEI on campuses justifies requiring Diversity Statements, the threat to free speech on campuses justifies requiring Free Speech Statements. But, again, Free Speech Statements shouldn’t be required even though there are serious threats to free speech on campus. Hence, Diversity Statements shouldn’t be required even if there are serious threats to DEI on campus.

So, it looks like the most plausible reasons that can be marshaled in favor of requiring Diversity Statements have equally (if not more) plausible counterparts that can be marshaled in favor of requiring Free Speech Statements. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t require Free Speech Statements, and that means we also shouldn’t require Diversity Statements.

The second reason we shouldn’t require Diversity Statements is that they consume a large collective amount of time without any clear justification. Each year, an average of nearly 500 PhDs in Philosophy are awarded between the United States and Canada. Now, let’s suppose that writing a good Diversity Statement takes 1 hour. Assuming all 500 newly minted PhDs will apply to at least one job that requires a Diversity Statement, that means 500 hours are being used each year writing Diversity Statements. That’s a lot of time. But it gets worse: that number doesn’t even take into account the time that philosophers already on the job market will use tinkering with their Diversity Statements, nor does it take into account those outside of the United States and Canada writing Diversity Statements, nor does it take into account the number of PhDs produced in other disciplines that suffer from Diversity Statement requirements, nor does it take into account the time it takes for hiring committees to read Diversity Statements. This means the number of hours Diversity Statements waste each year collectively far exceeds 500 hours.

So, a lot of time is used to produce Diversity Statements. Is there justification for using up all this time? If Diversity Statements achieve some (ethical) goal, perhaps they would be justified in eating up all this time. But do we have evidence that Diversity Statements do this? I know of no such evidence. True, we know they can be used to politically discriminate (see above), but political discrimination isn’t an ethical goal. Perhaps Diversity Statements are needed to produce some kind of diversity, e.g. phenotypic diversity. And perhaps one thinks that justifies all the time used to write them. However, it’s not clear that Diversity Statements are required to produce such diversity—there are other less time-consuming ways one can increase phenotypic diversity, if that’s the goal. It’s also not clear that they actually help produce phenotypic diversity—I know of no study showing that Diversity Statements have this effect. In fact, a recent study found no evidence that having a Chief Diversity Officer leads to an increase in hiring diverse faculty. And if Chief Diversity Officers don’t produce diversity, it’s dubious to think mere Diversity Statements produce diversity. So, at least absent evidence to the contrary, it appears that Diversity Statements unjustifiably waste a large amount of time and labor. Hence, we shouldn’t require them.

A third reason we shouldn’t require Diversity Statements is that they encourage lying and deception. For example, applicants know that in order to get hired, they need to convince a hiring committee that they’re worth taking a chance on. But if the hiring committee requires a Diversity Statement, the applicant can expect to be evaluated (in part) on the basis of this statement. And that gives the applicant reason to try to convince the hiring committee that they hold the “correct” views. For example, there’s evidence that philosophers who are politically left think discrimination against those with views more politically right is justified. And while this is an emerging area, research shows that applicants who focus on viewpoint diversity and not diversity of sex and race in their Diversity Statements are significantly penalized. This incentivizes applicants to make it appear they are politically left and that they think diversity of sex and race are crucially important, even if neither of these are true of the applicant.

So, applicants are incentivized to make it appear they align politically with the members of the hiring committee. In light of this, one might consider going to the recent Daily Nous post on Diversity Statements, looking at some major themes from the comments, and instructing Chat GPT to write a Diversity Statement hitting all the most popular themes. The fact that this is a rational move for applicants to make suggests that we’re incentivizing bad behavior (lying and deception) by requiring Diversity Statements. However, absent some kind of justification, we ought not to incentivize this kind of bad behavior. And so we shouldn’t require Diversity Statements.

So, we have (at least) several reasons—some stronger than others—not to require Diversity Statements. In light of these challenges, Diversity Statement apologists need to offer some justification for requiring them.

Now, I doubt I’ve convinced all Diversity Statement apologists to abandon their position. For those who are unconvinced, I suggest—no, beg—for the following compromise: let’s just have a box that applicants must check to indicate they aren’t opposed to DEI. That will save a huge amount of time and make it a little more difficult to politically discriminate. And that seems like something we should all be on board with.

Perry Hendricks

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Perry Hendricks is an unrestricted free agent on the philosophy job market, and you should hire him immediately. He’s also a father of three daughters and one son, and an aspiring trophy husband—although, he doesn’t work out enough to be a real trophy husband, nor does he have the face for it. He has published articles on abortion, medical ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. His book, Skeptical Theism, was recently published by Palgrave MacMillan, and everyone should cite, buy, and read it. He once got stuck on an elevator. He now takes steps to avoid that.